At his best Neil Jordan is one of cinema's most astonishing film makers; with The Butcher Boy, the director is at the peak of his artistry.
Comment
01/01/00
The Butcher Boy (1997)
79
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:57
Fresh:45
Rotten:12
Average Rating:7.5/10
Synopsis: Director Neil Jordan expertly blends fantasy and reality in the saga of Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens), an energetic and imaginative boy whose bleak existence in a small 1960s Ireland town eventually... [More]
Starring: Eamonn Owens, Stephen Rea, Alan Boyle, Sean McGinley
Director: Neil Jordan
Reviews for The Butcher Boy
Top CriticOwens' remarkable, high-pitched performance and Jordan's lush, visionary style are perfectly suited to the material.
03/11/08
Intensely colourful, but somehow soulless.
03/11/08
Director Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe adapted McCabe's novel for this bland 1998 shocker that fails miserably as satire, character study, and anything else it might have aspired to.
03/11/08
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12/01/07
A horrific tale of madness and abuse told with pop-eyed color and giddy humor.
02/28/07
Though the movie sometimes looks as if the authentic Irish wit, colour and blarney has been filtered through the sensibility of a Buñuel or Polanski, Jordan never allows the surreal/expressionist aspects to dominate.
06/24/06
The film almost immediately loses the major asset of the novel: its language. Possibly a quarter of the movie is incomprehensible to the American ear.
01/19/06
Neil Jordan's most accomplished and brilliant film to date, Butcher Boy is satisfying as faithful literary adaptation and inense cinematic experience that brings to mind in theme Kubrick's equally brilliant Cloakwork Orange.
12/24/05
Top CriticThe film's horrific conclusion is as uncompromising as it is inevitable and, unfortunately, ever-more topical.
12/06/05
The Butcher Boy manages to present scenes of violence and despair within a carnival atmosphere, yet still touches us, largely due to Jordan's assured hand in directing this complex tale.
04/09/05
No review available.
03/06/05
The Butcher Boy reveals how a soul's future, in the early stages of development, is highly influenced by love, or the lack of it.
01/15/05
I find myself in an embarrassing position: I think this is a great movie, but I’m not sure.
08/07/04
No review available.
05/28/04
No review available.
03/23/04
No review available.
12/17/03
No review available.
10/09/03
What makes the film so disturbing is that it charts much of what happens in the normal course of growing up -- filtered through the main character's warped sense of reality.
08/27/03
So interesting, so compelling and so devastating, that the old idea is fresh and new again.
05/22/03
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